Volume 18 , Issue 19

1911 - An Old Subscriber, Garrett Kouwenhoven

If you search back through The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brooklyn, New York, dated 26 October 1911, Thursday, page 32, you will find this mention: "An Old Subscriber."

Found on Newspapers.com

Peter Kouwenhoven of 3 Kouwenhoven Place, Flatbush, had put at the disposal of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle a receipt dated May 2, 1852, issued to his grandfather, Garrett Kouwenhoven, for a subscription to The Brooklyn Daily eagle & Kings County Democrat, the name by which The Eagle was then known. The receipt was apparently written and signed by Isaac Van Anden, the proprietor of the paper. The document was a great curiosity as evidence of the conditions which existed in the city when this paper was in it's leading strings and when the city itself was in the making.

Garrett Kouwenhoven, who thus manifested his appreciation of The Eagle, and of his interest in current events, was a large truck farmer in the northeasterly section of Flatbush. There he was born and there he labored, season after season, going to Washington Market with his loads of vegetables, just as truck farmers did at the present day of 1911. The soil of Mr. Kouwenhvoen's farm was heavy and very rich and the crops were large. The grandfather died in 1854, at the age of 76 and he was succeeded by his son Cornelius B., who came to the present Kouwenhoven house upon his marriage. Peter Kouwenhoven, son of Cornelius B., resided in the house at 3 Kouwenhoven place. He was born in 1842.

The ancestor of the Kouwenhovens, or, "the emigrant," as he was called, was Wolfert Gerritsen Van Kouwenhoven, who came from Holland in 1630 and in 1635 bought, with others, 15,000 acres of land from the Indians. It was part of these lands that the descendants of the Dutch farmers had been cultivating in Flatbush for all these years. They had supplied Brooklyn with the best of vegetables and had thus helped to make strong and healthy men and women.

The Old Kouwenhoven farm had been cut up into building lots, cement sidewalks were being put down and other proofs of the transformation of the country to the city were visible.

Peter Kouwenhoven's mother died last May (1911) in her 95th year. She had always lived in Flatbush and in the immediate vicinity of the place where she died.
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